What are advanced Excel skills including the use of pivot tables?

Answer 1

Pivot tables are truly one of the most valuable-yet-underutilized resources that Excel offers. In short, they provide a great way to manage large amounts of data.

Pivot tables are best utilized when you have set up your "raw data" (e.g., names and addresses in a mailing list, products orders, etc.) as a table. This means: organize by fields/columns and records/rows, as you would a database.

Once you run the pivot table on this data, you can re-combine it in new ways, such as:

a. group like-records together into single records.

b. add/sum up large sets of values.

c. play with different configurations of data display.

d. get a quick count of how many "types" of things are in a field (e.g., how many of "Product A" did I sell vs. of "Product B" and "Product C"?

Proficient users of Excel who deal with large amounts of data can barely go a day without using pivot tables in some way.

Other advanced skills you might use are lookup functions, macros, VBA, creating dashboards, using the Solver, linking worksheets and workbooks, linking to external data sources, doing what-if analysis and many other things.